Bad use of German

[Charles M]

As a native German speaker, I have a real bee in my proverbial bonnet about the bad use of German in books and, sadly, in WinSPWW2. It is no good impressing people with German words if they are misspelled or simply inappropriate! WinSPWW2 is after all an educational tool, and people should not have to pay good money for duff information. At best this pigeon-German is unprofessional; at worst it is providing incorrect information. A case in point is Campaign 008, Sturmgeschutz [sic] Brigade 276, scenarios 141 to 147 inclusive and scenario 853, among others. Now, there is no such word as Sturmgeschutz [sic]. The correct word is "Sturmgeschütz" or, alternatively, written with an additional 'e' after the second 'u' instead of the umlauted ü. This may seem a bit anal but it is important. Moreover, ALL German nouns are spelled with a capital letter. As Sturmgeschütz is a compound noun the correct abbreviation is StuG, not Stug [sic].

Another error is "Begliet [sic]", though in fairness this might be a typo, but again attention to detail is necessary in German. The noun derives from the verb begleiten - to escort or accompany. I once crossed swords with an author of an Osprey book (a company that I have taken to task on the Amazon discussion website for it's often poor proof reading), who thought he wrote the German word for "shooting" but transposed the 'i' and 'e' to produce a rude word for emptying one's bowels. He also has a habit of using grammatically-incorrect German adjectives. Another Osprey author also transposed these two letters so that the German word for " [pilot's] licence" became "Appeared [to be]", which is gibberish. There are other examples that are too tedious to describe. In the age of electronic dictionaries and translation devices available on everyone's mobile phone, there really is no longer any excuse for getting it wrong.

Then there is the old chestnut, Wehrmacht. It DOES NOT mean the German army, for which the words are das Heer. This should be blindingly obvious by looking at the WH, WL and WM prefixes to Third Reich military vehicles, similarly the German command structure of OKW with its subordinated OKH, OKL and OKM, where OK= Oberkommando. Wehrmacht more or less translates as armed forces, and encompassed the Heer, Luftwaffe and Marine / Kriegsmarine but not the Waffen SS. So Wehrmacht should be used with care, as there were no naval Sturngeschütz brigades, and use of Wehrmacht implies that the Waffen SS units are not relevant to the discussion. So please GET IT RIGHT or just use English. What's wrong with writing "German forces" or "German army"?